Tintin to get Weta treatment
Steven Spielberg has wrapped up shooting the first Tintin movie in Hollywood and will now pass it to Peter Jackson to complete the visual effects.
Spielberg last week completed 32 days of shooting the actors, including Daniel Craig as pirate Red Rackham, using special performance capture technology, Variety reported.
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of Unicorn will now continue at Weta Digital in Wellington under the eye of Jackson, the film’s producer.
Spielberg and Jackson have been tight-lipped on exactly how performance capture technology a more advanced version of how Andy Serkis was used as the model for the computer-generated Gollum in The Lord of the Rings is being used for the first of three Tintin movies. But it is understood it will be used to make the actors look similar to the characters depicted in the series by Herge.
Requests to visit the Los Angeles set of the film featuring the plucky Belgian reporter have been repeatedly turned down. “You have to see it to understand [the technology]. It really can’t be described,” said Spielberg spokesman Marvin Levy.
Kathleen Kennedy, who is also producing the series, said it was hard to describe exactly the world Spielberg and Jackson were creating in the film. “It’s extremely difficult to explain to someone unless they are standing next to me and usually then their reaction is, ‘Oh my God’.”
Jackson is likely to direct the second Tintin movie.
The special-effects house behind Avatar reveals a bit of its magic
If Avatar is the bright future of cinema, a great deal of that dazzle is going to come from Weta Digital, the firm that created most of the movie’s Oscar-winning visual effects.
This past January, IEEE Spectrum visited the company’s headquarters in a homey suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, where key officials spoke at length about cinema after Avatar. There were also a few tantalizing insights into Weta’s work for its next
blockbuster, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
Weta’s specialty is motion capture, which relies on sophisticated software and hardware to transfer an actor’s body movements and facial expressions to an animated character. The actor wears a black suit with light-colored dots; to detect his movement, optical systems track those dots.
For Avatar, Weta pushed the state of the art. First, it employed head-mounted cameras, worn by the actors, that tracked dots on their faces. The use of the camera greatly increased the range of emotions that could be transferred to the faces of the animated characters, enabling audiences to relate more closely to the computer-generated creatures.
Second, the Weta system enabled director James Cameron to see the results of motion capture essentially in real time. As the actors performed, Cameron was able to look at a screen near his camera and see, in place of actors in black suits, a slightly cruder version of the blue computer-generated space aliens that audiences would see.
The most complicated software challenge was coping with the essentially unlimited variety of expressions that a human face can convey. The solution, according to Weta specialist Luca Fascione, depended on identifying several hundred ”key poses”—fundamental facial expressions.
”The computer says, ’I want 30 percent of this one expression and 50 percent of this other expression,’ ” Fascione explains. ”And then the rigging and the machinery behind the puppeteering [character animation] system is able to make the face express that particular emotion.”
Meanwhile, as part of a push to advance the state of the art for the highly anticipatedTintin movie, a team at Weta is helping to devise a new generation of motion-capture software built on a foundation of physiological principles. The group is working on software that incorporates the underlying anatomy of the face.
”What I’m trying to do,” says team leader Mark Sagar, ”is reverse engineer all the expressions in the human face so we can understand the mechanical basis of, say, what makes a smile have a dimple. What makes the creases in a face when it smiles? It all depends on the anatomical structure of the face, the substructures beneath the facial tissue: the ligaments, the fat, the muscles, how the muscles are laid out in 3-D space.”
The Tintin film is a joint effort between Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson (Jackson cofounded Weta in 1993), with a budget rumored to be around US $135 million, well under Avatar’s reported $300 million to $400 million. Tintin is already the subject of sporadic movieland buzz because it’s understood to be a labor of love for Spielberg and Jackson. Both have professed deep affection for the comic-book series about a globe-trotting boy reporter, his wirehaired fox terrier, and his choleric seafaring friend. The movie, which is to be the first of a three-movie series, is scheduled for release in late 2011.
”Working with such directors as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, or Peter Jackson, there is never a known path that we’re going to go through,” says Weta R&D director Sebastian Sylwan. ”It’s always trying to push the boundaries of what can be delivered and how a better story can be told.”
Joe Letteri has served as visual effects supervisor at both Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital. In doing so, he’s had a hand in creating the most innovative and creative visual effects in film history. His career spans from The Abyss to the Oscar-nominatedAvatar. Screen Junkies caught up with him at the VES Awards to discuss Steven Spielberg’s first entry in the Tintin trilogy he’s tackling with Peter Jackson.
First up, he discusses what we can expect Tintin to look like:
“We’re experimenting with a number of different looks. When you do 3D you have a range of options to go with, slightly sort of cartoony. You go more Pixar style where there’s realism but still exaggeration. The problem with going completely photoreal with human characters is you want to honor the comicness of it. So we’re still feeling our way around it.”
MORE FROM JOE AFTER THE JUMP.
He then went on to describe introducing Spielberg to the Avatar technology used on the film:
“Tintin was a similar process because Peter [Jackson] sort of suggested to Steven the difficulty of doing a film that’s based on a comic character, trying to do live-action is always difficult to cast and to get the feel of the characters properly. So he suggested the idea of trying to do it as essentially a performance capture film. So Jim [Cameron] showed Steven and Peter what we were doing with ‘Avatar’ and they shot a couple days on the stage and loved the process. We shot ‘Tintin’ the same way. People are definitely picking up on the process. Jim has shown it to a lot of people. A lot of people came through the ‘Avatar’ set. He was pretty open and happy to demonstrate the whole technique. Because he’s designed it like a live-action set, it’s actually easier to pick up than most people think. From the outside it might look daunting but once you get in there on that stage and start working with it, it’s very much like shooting a live action. That was the whole point. You have all this technology in a way to remove the technology.”
He makes it sound so easy. Something must be holding up the works though since we shouldn’t expect to see The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in theaters before late 2011. Spielberg, Jackson, and Cameron probably spend most of their time gathering for regular let’s-rub-our-beards-together sessions. What, you think this kind of technology comes out of thin air?
References:http://www.screenjunkies.com/movienews/exclusive-weta-vfx-supervisor-joe-letteri-talks-tintin
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/2203711/Tintin-to-get-Weta-treatment
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/weta-digital-reverse-engineers-the-human-face
